Perth’s Bailey Perrie just dropped “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a full-throttle throwback to the era when your AIM away message was a Fall Out Boy lyric. The track runs at 150 BPM and doesn’t waste time getting to the point: the chorus is built entirely from 15 different 2000s song titles stitched together into something that’s both reference-heavy and surprisingly coherent.
We’re talking “Welcome to My Life,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “All the Small Things”, the deep cuts and the obvious ones, all woven into a story about unrequited love and emotional chaos. After her previous single “No Main Character” caught fire on TikTok, Perrie is leaning further into this alt-pop-rock lane, and based on this track, she’s got the chops to pull it off.
Musically, the song’s energy is infectious, and its identity as a love letter to 2000s pop-punk is bursting through. The polish of pop with the attitude of punk, with essentially every lyric being a nod to a song from that era, it’s a nostalgia trip of the highest order that somehow Bailey Perrie still delivers a good song that can be separated from its overt influences.
What makes this work is that Bailey Perrie isn’t just stacking references for the sake of it. The song actually functions on its own; you could listen without catching every nod and still get pulled in by the hooks and the energy. It’s nostalgic without being a museum piece, which is the balance these kinds of tracks need to hit. If you grew up with eyeliner and emotional MySpace bulletins, this’ll hit. If you didn’t, it still might.
